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Item: The only research vessel we have which could be helpful in determining where what kind of water pollution comes from is being sold by Government!
Item: Because of lack of Civil Service understanding and support it took three years to get the Air Pollution Control Ordinance onto the Statute Book. Since it has passed LEGCO, Government has been patting itself on the back but has done nothing to make the necessary regulations for the control of specified processes or to declare air control zones, or set up air quality objectives and fuel quality standards, all of which should have been planned in parallel with the Ordinance itself and should have been announced immediately the Ordinance was passed. The air pollution in industrial areas, and especially in Kwun Tong, is a scandal but all that is being done is to run seminars for concerned District Boards which are meant to try and persuade members of such Boards to support the masterly inactivity of Government.
Item: Government has never allowed sufficient finance to acquire proper monitoring instruments. Without baseline monitoring one cannot make proper decisions about how to tackle pollution and that is, of course, even more important when one has to deal with possible accidents from a nuclear power station.
Item: Although Government is fully aware of the dangers of lead, especially as it affects children, they are still contemplating children's playgrounds and other recreational and sitting out areas under flyovers where air pollution is highest. They also have not done anything to prevent small shops in highly populated areas from breaking up car batteries.
Item: In spite of considerable publicity in developed countries and especially in the United States of America, Government has been extremely slow in doing anything about the dangers of asbestos fibre and even now the import and use of blue asbestos is not banned in Hong Kong.
Item: The worst and most obvious air pollution is caused by small particles of dust mainly from construction and reclamations with some added from particulates emanating from diesel smoke, incinerators, coal dust and coal ash from our new coal-fired power stations, and cement dust and off-loading of ships in the Harbour of both cement and wheat. Yet all that Government is doing is trying to put together a voluntary code for the construction industry to follow when, in fact, Government itself controls how our reclamations should be handled. This particulate pollution is a major cause of bronchial and nose infections, and is one of the reasons why allergic rhinitis and various eye diseases are so prevalent in Hong Kong.
Item: The Lai Chi Kok incinerator has still not been fitted with electrostatic precipitators in spite of it adding its noxious particulate emissions to the already high pollution in the surrounding densely populated areas. It took ten years of pushing to get just one chimney of the Kennedy Town incinerator fitted with an electrostatic precipitator and the second one will not be fitted until next year. Ask anyone living downwind about pollution in Hong Kong not being all that bad!
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Item: My personal bete noire (pardon the pun) diesel smoke. Go to Tokyo or Osaka and the same vehicles used in Hong Kong run there without smoking. The reason: They are properly maintained and properly maintained diesel vehicles do not smoke. It took a lot of pushing to get the police equipped with smoke meters and to have the police actually prosecute smoking vehicles (the Law had been on the books for years before any enforcement steps were taken). Diesel smoke is injurious to health, contributes a great deal to our particulate air pollution and is one of the most noticeable of all our pollutions, yet Government steps to control it have always been half-hearted, in spite of years of recommendations by SCAP and EPCOM. Even today the fines are much too low (it is cheaper to pay the fine than to maintain the car) and some obviously offending vehicles like public buses are never prosecuted.
Item: When coal-fired power stations were first mooted both SCAP and EPCOM warned many times that pulverised fly-ash (PFA) would constitute a major problem. This was shrugged off and left entirely to the power companies who have behaved very responsibly. But, because of the present recession in the building trade, the PFA cannot be used by the cement industry in the quantities originally envisaged (SCAP had asked for contingency planning for just such an eventuality) and the handling of PFA now leaves much to be desired and, because of the fineness of the ash, adds a dangerous aspect to the particulate pollution.
Item: Government admits to smoking in Hong Kong causing two thousand deaths annually (source Henry Ching's letter South China Morning Post, 6 August) and yet does not even ban tobacco television advertising.
Item: Government was fully aware of the danger of the type of gas water-heaters being sold in Hong Kong yet it took them six years before stopping sales and even today people are still dying quite unnecessarily because of water-heater accidents.
This list is by no means exhaustive (for instance, I have not even mentioned noise pollution where Government has done even less than in the fields of pollution I have just quoted. Yet noise, other than diesel smoke, is the most intrusive and noticeable pollution we have in Hong Kong) and just gives some major examples of what I consider Government's neglect and I think I have made clear by giving these examples that as far as the environment is concerned, the Hong Kong Government's paternalistic guided consensus has fallen down badly. The early initiatives for dealing with Hong Kong's pollution practically all came from what are nowadays euphemistically called 'pressure groups', which in fact in the late sixties and early seventies consisted of just a dozen or so people who were far-seeing enough to realize that we were building ourselves a huge problem. And let it also be said that most of those people came from the polluting industries themselves. In the forerunners to EPCOM